Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Circular Dream Trap


3/08/2010 On Waking...

Lots of dreams, non descript. A Deadwood dream: I was going back to The Gem, an aged Al Swearengen (who looked a lot more like Wild Bill Hickok) with small round face, long white hair. He was very pleased to see me in a concealed way, like the return of an old but grown-to-love nemesis. He said I still had plenty of funds left in his holding (4000 gold units) and implied it was slightly more than I was able to carry, case and all. I went upstairs to meet an old lover of some sort, probably an amalgam of Lady Garrett and that woman who plays Mr. Whites wife in Breaking Bad, as I went upstairs I could read her dreams, I was briefly juxtaposed into her 2nd person perspective and she was dreaming of the protagonist, who at this point I realise was nobody from the actual series. Upon returning to 1st person protagonist viewpoint, I go upstairs to meet her, find her sleeping or in some form of induced coma, and an altercation breaks out between Al Swearengen, myself and the owner of the other hotel (wikipedia tells me E.B. Farnum). And a mathematical debate breaks out about my chances of beating both to the draw and surviving, or more to the point; Al’s chances of loosing. EB explained how the initial 10:1 of an overskilled gunfighter in close quarters with a slightly lesser skilled (Al) and unskilled fighter (EB) was to be revised down to 8:1 due to some further set of circumstances and that it was not a risk worth taking for Al, given I would draw for him first. This is all I remember of the dream, I was getting bored, even by the scenery and settings and by this point and the creeping lucidity that I was being stuck in yet another ‘circular dream trap’ was becoming real to me. I broke out of delusion-state and changed the dream before abandoning lucidity and hoping I would enjoy the next one more.
 
Circular Dream Trap: this is a very common form of unpleasant dream I am well used to having. I believe it to be the result of oversleep, latent anxiety, REM failure, or any of the above. It essentially works, or I believe it to work, by having certain parts of the brain normally repressed in order to maintain a quality dream state become awakened, while possibly having other parts of the brain drop in their activity, perhaps from overuse or fatigue. This would support the oversleep idea, I tend to only get stuck in a dream trap after having dreamed for too long or too intensely in a single nights sleep.
 
As for the trap itself: Imagine that Greek concept of hell where you push a boulder to the top of a hill, taking an entire days labour, only to find it at the very bottom of the hill the next waking morning. The trap is characterised by a stressful and anxiety laden series of circular tasks or goals that can never quite be accomplished, the more you try to achieve them the more that goes wrong and gets in your way. The more you canvass all options and push the boundaries of the dream, the more the dream changes and morphs into a second dream without you realising... all memory of the puzzle forgotten for at least another series of minutes, leaving you again temporarily fresh and eager to escape before realising in the dying seconds of the dream you have had the same one 11 times in a row now and are about to have your memory wiped and go for number 12.
 
The quintessential circular dream trap, I will describe, is one I had in late high school. I was stuck in Melbourne Central Station, platform 1, desperate to go home. Every time a train was close to coming, it would be cancelled. Every time a train actually came, I had become momentarily distracted by getting my money jammed in a vending machine, being held up at the bathroom, going to find a non-existent friend to remind them they were about to miss the train, and so on. All that matters was that I never got on the train: something would always get in the way. Dream-time, this would continue for hours, and usually at every stage of failure I would remember how many times I had failed previously for only a brief few seconds before the world shifted and I once again became absorbed in the dream world, saying ‘Aha, next train in 5 minutes, I’m out of here’. Finally I would break out of the confines of the dream world, going up to street level to find a bus for example, trying to call my mum for a lift on my phone, even attempting to walk it. This would only ever make things worse by expanding the trap, and I would waste at least another 5 dream stages missing busses, getting lost in the CBD at night, or having my phone conversation cut out due to lack of credit or low battery.
 
As time would go on, the stages would become narrower and narrower, collapsing in on themselves, changing every 5 seconds. At every corner, at every turn, every time I opened a door, the dream would reset and enter a new stage, and I would be reminded of the hell I was stuck in with machine gun repetitively but never long enough to find a way to exit it. Exiting dreams has never been hard for me, but it does require at least a good 15 seconds of in-dream time to realise you are in a dream and remember a good exit technique. Eventually the dream would collapse completely, and I would find myself swimming in a sea of grey, distant sounds filtering through the haze and wondering where I was and what was happening. At this point I would wake up, usually in a cold sweat, pounding headache, and realising I had overslept by a good 3 hours. The Dream trap had prevented my circadian rhythm from waking me up naturally; I had dreamed every last drop that I could until my brain could not sustain the dream state any longer and the dream state failed. Under a sedative, or in a coma, I truly fear how bad a Circular Dream Trap could get. It scares me to this day.
 
Luckily, I have become very good at killing Circular Dream Traps before they start, as happened last night. Somehow I could feel the back and forth mathematical arguments between the three of us would only get deeper and more complex until my dream shifted and became dominated by an unsolvable puzzle or paradoxical labyrinth or impossible task. I am not sure why I realised it or what happened when I prevented it this time, I guess that the dream state shifted, ended and I slept out the rest of my night in a state of non-REM sleep. Maybe I got a small and tidy second dream out of it, I am not sure... either way I woke up feeling quite good so clearly it did work. It has been years since I had a truly horrible dream trap experience, but I have no doubt that the right (or wrong) environmental triggers could pull me into another at any time.

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